I mean, there's no takeaway. I was responding to the dude's comment about how somehow me not watching the show when it first aired is a lesser experience than me watching four seasons uninterrupted. I don't feel like I need to repeat myself, but watching the show that way resulted in a better experience for me. It's not about being cynical enough to distrust the creators. I thought I spelled it out clearly: Marketing is going to market. Its job is to entice people. To dangle a carrot and get people to chase it. I don't like that, so I try to avoid marketing as much as possible, and just let the movie/show/game/book/whatever do its thing when I experience it. When it's a video game, I'll watch the trailer, maybe read an interview/hands on about the content/features of the game, then buy/not buy based on that. With a movie, watch a trailer, see if it intrigues me, then decide if I want to see it in a theater or wait for rental. TV is trickier, especially for an ongoing series, which is why I generally tend to wait until a series has a few seasons under its belt before I dive in (I didn't watch Mad Men, Breaking Bad, LOST, etc, etc, until they were well into their runs). I admit I've been burned so many times by promising shows I enjoy having the plug pulled on them after season 1 that I've become incredibly cautious about jumping into new shows. That in itself is a double edged sword/catch 22, because if more people had that mentality, they wouldn't be watching new shows, and the numbers would be so low that the show wouldn't get renewed, and it's a vicious cycle. But I digress.
The creators are only in control of so much messaging themselves. Of course they aren't going to say, "These mysteries aren't actually building up to anything, and we're making everything up as we go along, so no promises; stop watching the show." They're going to try to be diplomatic and cagey. As a writer myself, I understand all too well about how important it is to have payoff after building something up. Unfortunately, television is weird, and long form television even more so. Things could be meticulously planned before hand, and other factors will throw that all in disarray. Those factors could be time, budget, the realities of shooting on location as opposed to a sound stage, actor issues (personal and professional), etc, etc. Also, "making it up as you go along," is kind of standard fare for a lot of writers. There's usually a bare bones skeleton of a plot, with a few key pillars/milestones that the writer would like to hit as the story progresses. The minutiae is often up in the air. How characters get to those milestones is kept vague, because, as a writer, it's fun to have some spontaneity when writing chapters/episodes. With that said, I don't think it absolves the writers of getting carried away with so many "micro-mysteries" that the core of the show buckles under the weight.
Sometimes writers drop the ball (and in a six season show of 100+ episodes, with a team of writers all handling different episodes, often concurrently, I can see how it'd be easy to drop a few balls), but then again, I never said that the viewers were solely at fault for getting sucked into the mysteries of the show. I said that for that particular poster I was quoting, he wasn't forced to obsess until 2am about the show. That is, quite literally, on him, not the writers of the show, or the other viewers of the show. It's a personal choice he made to get sucked into obsessing over the mysteries and how they affected him. As I stated before, I didn't follow the shows ancillary content. I didn't follow the interviews and PR or any other content revolving around the show, so I honestly don't know what the creators said or didn't say. I only know what I watched either through streaming/dvd, or as it aired (in the case of Seasons 5 and 6, which I was able to watch as they aired every week). But even watching those last two seasons, I didn't feel terribly compelled to go on forums, or dig up interviews, or speculate. I was just enjoying the ride. After the fact (after Season 6), I did go to one of the old LOST forums and read what people were saying about the series and finale, but I wasn't a part of the crowd that came together every week to discuss the show. I empathize with the poster I was quoting in that the show is somehow retroactively ruined because of that final season, but I don't feel the same way. shrug. I think it's unfortunate that the creators were cagey about the mysteries, and how they built up and then resolved/not resolved those mysteries, and I think that sucks, but it doesn't ruin the show for me. I see how it may upset people like the poster I quoted, however.